The State of the Long Beach Press-Telegram

We swung by the gas station on the way to work on Monday to buy a cup of coffee, because nobody makes coffee as good as gas stations, and we saw a stack of Long Beach newspapers that weren’t Press-Telegrams on the counter. You coulda knocked us over with a battering ram.

In a lot of ways, the new paper, the Long Beach Register, resembles the Press-Telegram because it has stories by former Press-Telegram reporters and pictures by a former Press-Telegram photographer. Its editors and publisher are former Press-Telegram editors and a former Press-Telegram publisher and its designers are former Press-Telegram designers — all understandable, because if you’re going to cover Long Beach properly you pretty much want to hire people from the paper that’s been covering Long Beach since 1897.

Did the little exodus (exodette?) of P-T’ers seeking asylum at a newspaper with an eye toward toppling the newspaper of record in Long Beach hurt us?

Personally? Yes, a little bit. We actually liked one of the people who left. Otherwise: Betrayed. Backstabbed. Sold out for some pieces of silver.

For several hours we felt mildly depressed by the turncoats, but then things started happening at the newspaper we’ve called home for 37 years. We started hiring some serious talent and otherwise beefing up the staff to replace and counter the murine — erstwhile staffers who thought they were scampering off a burning ship into the welcoming arms of a paper with libertarian/crackpot roots.

Can we say we have three city editors now that are better than any we’ve had in our memory without sounding like a slavering sycophant? Probably not, so we’ll skirt around that.

We will happily say, however, that the P-T staff now is stronger than it’s been since we could fit into our high school track uniform.

We’ve got staff writers Andrew Edwards and Josh Dulaney writing in-depth pieces and Touting everything that moves. We’ve got a new (to us) cop reporter, Beatriz Valenzuela, who just wrote a piece about LBPD’s new technology. We’ve got a new K-12 education writer, Nadra Nittle, who has the qualifications of a secretary of education.

And haven’t enough people been fawning over the addition of the superstar prep sportsters JJ Fidler and Mike Guardabascio? Do we really need to add to that?

And that’s to say nothing of the non-traitors and their work here, including the 111 years of combined P-T presence of Public Editor Rich Archbold, reporter Joe Segura and your unabashedly enthusiastic brown-eyed correspondent who is relieved to be almost finished writing this because, frankly, he gets a lot more pleasure out of not liking something than of liking something.

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Lord, this all sounds so creepy and advertorial, but if we can’t bray and crow a little bit about the improvements made here we’ll end up writing about puppies and politics again.

Editors and bigger bosses at the Register say they’re just trying to put out a great paper and that they’re not looking for a newspaper war.

It’s cool. No sense in everybody getting all bloodied up. And we do have to give sincere thanks to the Other Side for making us a better paper.